A relational perspective on job design and work motivation: How making a difference makes a difference.

This dissertation adopts a relational perspective on job design and work motivation. The dissertation is divided into three papers that examine the contextual antecedents, psychological mechanisms, behavioral consequences, and boundary conditions of prosocial motivation. The first paper builds on recent conceptual work to develop and validate measures of the relational job characteristics predicted to cultivate prosocial motivation and the psychological states that undergird this motivation. The second paper reports a field experiment and three laboratory experiments that investigate the behavioral effects, mediating mechanisms, and boundary conditions of prosocial motivation. The third paper focuses on prosocial motivation in the context of public service work, presenting a field experiment testing the hypothesis that exposure to stories about the prosocial impact of their jobs can enhance the motivation of lifeguards. Together, the eight studies illuminate how the relational architectures of jobs can enable prosocial motivation, and document the surprising strength of this motivation in guiding employees' behaviors and experiences. The findings offer significant implications for research on job design, work motivation, prosocial behavior, public service, high reliability organizing, and meaning-making and relationships in organizations. This dissertation thus illustrates how work contexts can be designed to motivate employees to care about making a positive difference in other people's lives, and examines when, how, and why this motivation can make a positive difference in employees' lives.Ph.D.ManagementOccupational psychologyPsychologySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/126039/2/3224891.pd